Towards Knowledge Evolution in Software Engineering

Harmful software has resulted in loss of life, societal and environmental damage alongside economic losses from fines and sales embargoes. When someone perceives their team or organisation is creating or operating harmful software (e.g., defective, vulnerable, malicious or illegal), one way to attempt to change the situation is to “blow the whistle” and disclose the situation internally or externally. Studying harmful situations and the effectiveness of interventions, up to and including whistleblowing, can help identify technical and human successes and failings in software engineering (SE). The aim of this paper is to explore the extent to which whistleblowing is studied in SE with the objective of identifying themes, research approaches, gaps and concerns, and the implications for future SE research and practice. We find that whistleblowing is an under-explored area of SE research, and where research exists, it often takes the view that reporting harm is a matter of individual moral responsibility; we argue this poorly reflects SE collaborative practice where professional responsibilities are distributed across the software development lifecycle. We conclude by 1) recommending approaches that can help a more timely identification and mitigation of harm in SE; 2) suggesting mechanisms for improving the effectiveness and the personal safety of harm-reporting in SE, and 3) reflecting on the role that professional bodies can have in supporting harm reporting, up to and including whistleblowing.

Software Engineering: A Methodical Approach (Second Edition) provides a comprehensive, but concise introduction to software engineering. It adopts a methodical approach to solving software engineering problems, proven over several years of teaching, with outstanding results. The book covers concepts, principles, design, construction, implementation, and management issues of software engineering. Each chapter is organized systematically into brief, reader-friendly sections, with itemization of the important points to be remembered. Diagrams and illustrations also sum up the salient points to enhance learning. Additionally, the book includes the author’s original methodologies that add clarity and creativity to the software engineering experience. New in the Second Edition are chapters on software engineering projects, management support systems, software engineering frameworks and patterns as a significant building block for the design and construction of contemporary software systems, and emerging software engineering frontiers. The text starts with an introduction of software engineering and the role of the software engineer. The following chapters examine in-depth software analysis, design, development, implementation, and management. Covering object-oriented methodologies and the principles of object-oriented information engineering, the book reinforces an object-oriented approach to the early phases of the software development life cycle. It covers various diagramming techniques and emphasizes object classification and object behavior. The text features comprehensive treatments of: Project management aids that are commonly used in software engineering An overview of the software design phase, including a discussion of the software design process, design strategies, architectural design, interface design, database design, and design and development standards User interface design Operations design Design considerations including system catalog, product documentation, user message management, design for real-time software, design for reuse, system security, and the agile effect Human resource management from a software engineering perspective Software economics Software implementation issues that range from operating environments to the marketing of software Software maintenance, legacy systems, and re-engineering This textbook can be used as a one-semester or two-semester course in software engineering, augmented with an appropriate CASE or RAD tool. It emphasizes a practical, methodical approach to software engineering, avoiding an overkill of theoretical calculations where possible. The primary objective is to help students gain a solid grasp of the activities in the software development life cycle to be confident about taking on new software engineering projects.

Theory-oriented software engineering

A review of the qualitative research methods discussed in papers that study software engineering teams showed most of those papers did not follow a systematic process during the qualitative analysis. This finding is concerning as this deficiency in research analysis procedure may reduce the validity and/or completeness of the qualitative results. Such a lack of rigor may be a result of qualitative research not being as firmly established in software engineering as quantitative research methodologies. In engineering research, quantitative methods are typically more prevalent and qualitative analysis is part of a mixed-method analysis process. However, when researching teams, where human activity is abundant, qualitative analysis may need to take precedence. In this paper, we focus on the qualitative analysis method called content analysis with the goal of presenting a rigorous process for content analysis in the context of software engineering. We then present and demonstrate the use of that content analysis process for software engineering researchers using two examples. An analysis of 215 articles that were a result of a mapping study on software engineering team research is presented. Those papers were analyzed to determine which utilized a qualitative data analysis method in their research in addition to the rigor and type of qualitative analysis performed. We ultimately included 23 papers in this study. We present a mapping study and a content analysis process that include a straightforward way to select, code, and present data in both inductive and deductive studies. We demonstrated the process using the keywords from the papers included in this study as well as on a second data set that utilized responses from structured interview transcripts from practicing software engineers. The first dataset also resulted in a taxonomy to categorize software engineering team research. We presented and demonstrated a content analysis process in terms of software engineering in order to improve future qualitative software engineering research that would benefit from systematic content analysis.

Software lifecycles are becoming an increasingly important issue for computational science & engineering (CSE) software. The process by which a piece of CSE software begins life as a set of research requirements and then matures into a trusted high-quality capability is both commonplace and extremely challenging. Although an implicit lifecycle is obviously being used in any effort, the challenges of this process-respecting the competing needs of research vs. production-cannot be overstated. Here we describe a proposal for a well-defined software life-cycle process based on modern Lean/Agile software engineering principles. What we propose is appropriate for many CSE software projects that are initially heavily focused on research but also are expected to eventually produce usable high-quality capabilities. The model is related to TriBITS, a build, integration and testing system, which serves as a strong foundation for this lifecycle model, and aspects of this lifecycle model are ingrained in the TriBITS system. Indeed this lifecycle process, if followed, will enable large-scale sustainable integration of many complex CSE software efforts across several institutions.

The software development process model or what is commonly called SDLC (Software Development Life Cycle) is one of the Software Engineering (RPL) course materials in the Information Engineering Education (PTI) undergraduate study program where one of the competencies is understanding and knowing the concepts of device engineering software that can be applied in the software development life cycle which is summarized in the material for the SDLC software development process model. This material is the initial material that must be mastered by students to develop quality software. The use of interactive and interesting computer assisted learning media is expected to help the stages of the student learning process properly. This requires an interactive learning multimedia application. The purpose of this research is to develop interactive learning media as an alternative to independent learning tools to assist students in mastering the Software Development Process Model (SDLC) material for students and to find out the feasibility of multimedia application products for learning the Software Development Process Model (SDLC). The research and development methodology used in this research is Research and Development (R&D) with Borg and Gall's development steps which include: (1) Research and data collection; (2) Planning; (3) Development of product drafts; (4) Initial field trials; (5) Revision of trial results (6) Field trials; (7) Product improvement; (8) Field implementation test; (9) Completion of the final product; and (10) Dissemination of implementation. This methodology covers all matters relating to development to produce quality interactive learning media software. Based on the trials, the results obtained were 90.63 percent from media experts, 98.08 percent from material experts, 85.46 percent from initial field trials, 84.56 percent from field trials, and 86.27 percent from field implementation trials. The average value obtained is 89 percent based on the results of the overall data analysis. The conclusion of this research is that the development of multimedia applications for learning the Software Development Process Model (SDLC) is feasible as an independent learning medium. The product produced in this development research is a multimedia application for learning flash-based software development process (SDLC) models.

The worldwide software ecosystem is a trust-rich part of the world. Throughout the software life cycle, software engineers, end-users, and other stakeholders collaboratively place their trust in major hubs in the ecosystem, such as package managers, repository services, and software components. However, as our reliance on software grows, this trust is frequently violated by bad actors and crippling vulnerabilities in the software supply chain. This study aims to define software trust in the worldwide SECO, that is, to determine what signifies a trustworthy system, actor, or hub. We conduct a systematic literature review on the concept of trust in the software ecosystem. We acknowledge that trust is something between two actors in the software ecosystem, and we examine what role trust plays in the relationships between end-users and (1) software products, (2) package managers, (3) software producing organizations, and (4) software engineers. Two major findings emerged from the systematic literature review. To begin, we define trust in the software ecosystem by examining the definition and characteristics of trust. Second, we provide a list of trust factors that can be used to assemble an overview of software trust. Trust is critical in the communication between actors in the worldwide software ecosystem, particularly regarding software selection and evaluation. With this comprehensive overview of trust, software engineering researchers have a new foundation to understand and use trust to create a trustworthy software ecosystem.

All approaches to information systems and software development assume lifecycle models, which have a significant impact upon the perspective adopted for design and development. In recognition of the limitations of conventional software engineering lifecycles, the Information Systems (IS) community has focused upon gaining recognition of organizational and human issues in systems design. The Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) community has also tried to introduce user-centered practices into software engineering, but its success has been limited because it has augmented existing lifecycle models that are document or risk-driven. Yet, user-centered design can only be fully realized through the adoption of a user-centered model of the information systems lifecycle as the basis for developing ICT-based systems. This paper explains how several of the limitations of current IS and HCI theory and practice can be overcome by modeling development lifecycles in terms of social transformation. The paper then presents an information systems development lifecycle based upon social transformation and illustrates how a user-centered software development lifecycle can be integrated into the IS development process.

Artificial intelligence and recent advances in deep learning architectures, including transformer networks and large language models, change the way people think and act to solve problems. Software engineering, as an increasingly complex process to design, develop, test, deploy, and maintain large-scale software systems for solving real-world challenges, is profoundly affected by many revolutionary artificial intelligence tools in general and machine learning in particular. In this roadmap for artificial intelligence in software engineering, we highlight the recent deep impact of artificial intelligence on software engineering by discussing successful stories of applications of artificial intelligence to classic and new software development challenges. We identify the new challenges that the software engineering community has to address in the coming years to successfully apply artificial intelligence in software engineering, and we share our research roadmap toward the effective use of artificial intelligence in the software engineering profession, while still protecting fundamental human values. We spotlight three main areas that challenge the research in software engineering: the use of generative artificial intelligence and large language models for engineering large software systems, the need of large and unbiased datasets and benchmarks for training and evaluating deep learning and large language models for software engineering, and the need of a new code of digital ethics to apply artificial intelligence in software engineering.

Welcome to ICSE 2002, the Twenty-Fourth International Conference on Software Engineering!This year, besides the 3 keynotes, 48 papers, 3 panels, 9 industry papers, 2 invited industry presentations, 2 state-of-the-art talks, 3 impact talks, 8 posters, and 3 informal demonstrations in the main ICSE conference, we have 16 tutorials, 14 workshops, 2 symposia and 1 co-located event. These proceedings represent a snapshot in history on the state of the art and state of the practice of software engineering.While the road to ICSE was complicated by events taking place around the world, the unfortunate need to relocate does not detract from the outstanding opportunity we all have to share ideas and experiences and to foster new relationships with members of our profession.It Takes 2 to TangoWhile all software engineers may be accused of dancing to the beat of different drummers, one could speculate which dance partner they might want to select: • industrial applied software engineers and academic researchers in software engineering? • software engineers and systems engineers? • software engineers and information technologists? • software engineers and computer scientists?The point I am trying to make is that this year's ICSE brings together all of the above combinations and facilitates a synergistic environment for all attendees.Research is a community endeavor. ICSE is the premier generalist conference in software engineering research, encompassing all major subfields of software engineering. It plays a vital role in maintaining and developing the research community through exchange of ideas, development of a research agenda and setting standards for quality research.303 full research papers were submitted to ICSE 2002, of which 45 (less than 15reviewing and selectivity make publication in ICSE an honor for authors of selected papers, and ensures attendees and readers a selection of the best current research in software engineering.A program committee of experts drawn from around the world and across the spectrum of software engineering research were responsible for selecting a program of high quality technical papers and providing constructive criticism to authors of all submissions, whether selected or not. ICSE program committee members commit to a very heavy load of reviewing, made heavier this year by a review period that was shortened when we postponed the paper submission deadline by a week due to the tragic events of September 11. Each submitted paper was reviewed by three or more members of the program committee. The final selection was made in a lively two day, face-to-face meeting of the full committee. We are grateful to the ICSE 2002 program committee for magnificent work under difficult conditions, and we are proud of the result they have achieved.

We welcome you to the Twenty-Eighth International Conference on Software Engineering and Shanghai, China. This is the first instance of the ICSE conference series to be held in China, and it is an exciting time and place for ICSE 2006. The conference brings researchers, educators, practitioners and students together to present, exchange ideas and engage in discussions about the recent and exciting innovations and research in software engineering. Exciting sessions on practical experience, educational issues, and doctoral and new faculty symposia have been organized. The conference also includes a wide variety of tutorial, workshops and demonstration offerings. Finally, since research and markets in our host country China are continuously growing, ICSE includes a separate Far East Track for discussions on the contributions and challenges of our Chinese colleagues. We trust that this mix will provide interesting and stimulating offerings to all members of our growing community. The technical program committee is pleased to present this conference proceeding that contains the research papers of the technical program for ICSE 2006. The technical program for this conference focuses on new and innovative software engineering contributions in theory, formal methods, system building and empirical studies. The papers represent an alluring array of topics, including software design, architecture, reuse, testing, analysis, processes and formal methods. Because of the growing number of paper submission and the resulting large program committees in the past, we instituted a new two-phase reviewing process this year. Our program committee had 36 members. In the first phase, each submitted paper was reviewed by 3 reviewers: 2 from the program committee and an external reviewer from the software engineering community. We had 265 external reviewers who contributed 370 reviews for this phase. Those papers receiving the best reviews were considered in the second phase. A total of 99 papers entered the second phase. Each of these papers was reviewed by another program committee member. Thus, each accepted paper had a total of 4 reviews (3 reviews from pc members and 1 review from an external reviewer). Each rejected paper had at least 3 reviews. The pc members reviewed 24-25 papers in the two phases, a reasonable number. We feel that this system worked very well. The program committee met for two days in December, 2005 in Frankfurt, Germany. By the end of the meeting, a consensus emerged for the 36 papers in this proceedings (9% of the total submissions). There were many high quality submissions that could not be accommodated in the program; hopefully a revised version will be published elsewhere. In addition to the papers, we organized four invited sessions. One invited session focuses on empirical studies, an increasingly important component of software engineering research and practice. We also have an invited panel that addresses the value and practice of formal methods. Since software engineering techniques are growing in importance in challenging safety critical domains, we included two invited sessions: one on software engineering for automotive engineering and the other on software engineering for assisted living. We are very pleased that a notably diverse and outstanding group of three leaders of the software engineering community have agreed to present keynote speeches. The opening day keynote will be presented by Prof. Yang Fuqing, from Peking University, a woman who has been at the very forefront of the software engineering communities of research and practice in China for decades. Her perspectives on the past and future of software engineering in China will be complemented by a keynote on similar themes presented on the second day. This second keynote will be delivered by Prof. Barry Boehm, from the University of Southern California, USA. His talk will review the history of software engineering research and practice in the West over the past decades, and project it forward into the 21st century. Finally, the keynote speaker on the third day, Mr. Reinhold Achatz, from Siemens Corp., will present a complementary view of software engineering research and practice, as viewed from the perspective of one of the great multinational corporations, based in Europe. We are truly excited at the prospect that these three keynotes will provide a searching multidimensional view of our community at this time of historic convergence of communities. The continued success and high quality of the ICSE conference series would not be possible without the help and support of the software engineering community. First, we would like to gratefully acknowledge and thank all of the authors who submitted papers. We especially thank the program committee members for their efforts and commitments in reviewing the papers and securing reviews from external reviewers. They put in an extraordinary amount of their time to provide thoughtful and knowledgeable reviews. The exceptionally strong technical program represented by the papers in this proceeding could not be possible without their efforts.

The management of software evolution as well as the maintenance of its complexity is of two most important problems to be solved by software engineering. Several solutions have been considered, one of them being the separation of concerns. These concepts have been extended along the life cycle of software development and thus, aspect oriented software development (AOSD) arose and shed new light on software evolution problems. In this paper we focus on the seamless integration of AOSD and software architecture to support dynamic software evolution in architecture level. Thus we propose an incremental aspect-oriented (AO) architecture modeling approach. In the approach we introduce a unified formal model, namely aspect weaving connector (AWC), to formalize the underlying mechanisms of aspect dynamic weaving in architecture level. Meanwhile, we introduce a simple and seamless extension of ACME ADL to support the modular representation of architectural aspects, components, AWC and their composition forms. For the unified connector model has been applied in our implemented framework for dynamic software architecture, a case study on adaptive JPS (Java pet store) is illustrated to show the advantages of this approach and the unified model.

The aim of this article is to describe a method that helps analysts to translate qualitative data gathered in the field, collected for the purpose of requirements specification, to a model usable for software engineers. Requirements specification constitutes three different parts: functional requirements, quality requirements, and nonfunctional requirements. The first one specifies how the software system should function, who are the actors, and what are the input and output of the functions. The second one specifies what quality requirements the software should meet while operating in context of its environment such as reliability, usability, efficiency, portability, and maintainability. Finally, the third part specifies other requirements including context of use and development constraints. Examples of context of use are where and when the system is used, and examples of development constraints are human resources, cost and time constraints, technological platforms, and development methods. The role of the requirements specification is to give software engineers a basis for software design, and, later in the software development life cycle, to validate the software system. Requirements specification can also serve the purpose of validating users’ or customers’ view of the requirements of the system. On one hand, there has been a growing trend towards analyzing needs of the user and abilities through participatory design (Kuhn & Muller, 1993), activity theory (Bertelsen & Bødker, 2003), contextual design (Beyer & Holtzblatt, 1998), user-centered design (Gulliksen, Göransson, & Lif, 2001), and co-design and observation as in ethnography (Hughes, O’Brien, Rodden, Rouncefield, & Sommerville, 1995). Common to these methods is that qualitative data (Taylor & Bogdan, 1998) is collected, to understand the future environment of the new system, by analyzing the work or the tasks, their frequency and criticality, the cognitive abilities of the user and the users’ collaborators. The scope of the information collected varies depending on the problem, and sometimes it is necessary to gather data about the regulatory, social, and organizational contexts of the problem (Jackson, 1995) to be solved. The temporal and spatial contexts describe when the work should be carried out and where. On the other hand, software engineers have specified requirements in several different modelling languages that range from semiformal to formal. Examples of semiformal languages are UML (Larman, 2002), SADT, and IDEF (Ross, 1985). Examples of the latter are Z (Potter, Sinclair, & Till, 1996), VDM or ASM. Those are modelling languages for software development, but some languages or methods focus on task or work modelling such as Concurrent Task Trees (Paterno, 2003) and Cognitive Work Analysis (Vicente, 1999). Others emphasize more the specification method than a modelling language. Examples of the former are Scenario-Based Design (SBD) (Rosson & Carroll, 2002) and Contextual Design (Beyer & Holtzblatt, 1998). In practice, many software developers use informal methods to express requirements in text, e.g., as narrations or stories. Agile Development Methods (Abrahamsson, Warsta, Siponen, & Ronkainen, 2003) emphasize this approach and thereby are consistent with their aim of de-emphasizing methods, processes, and languages in favor of getting things to work. A popular approach to requirements elicitation is developing prototypes. There has been less emphasis on bridging the gap between the above two efforts, for example, to deliver a method that gives practical guidelines on how to produce specifications from qualitative data (Hertzum, 2003). One reason for this gap can be that people from different disciplines work on the two aspects, for example, domain analysts or experts in HCI, and software engineers who read and use requirements specification as a basis for design. Another reason for this gap may be in the difference in the methods that the two sides have employed, that is, soft methods (i.e., informal) for elicitation and analysis and hard methods (i.e., formal) for specification. In this article, we suggest a method to translate qualitative data to requirements specification that we have applied in the development of a Smart Space for Learning. The process borrows ideas from or uses scenarios, interviews, feature-based development, soft systems methodology, claims analysis, phenomenology, and UML.

The software development life cycle (SDLC) is a structured process for delivering a high-quality product within a specified timeframe. Developing a cost-effective and efficient software product life cycle has always been a priority in software engineering, which can impact product quality. This study aims to provide an overview of the recent articles that focus on applying optimization techniques, mathematical models, and software cost estimation in the software development process and propose possible future directions. For the selected 29 studies, the development phase of the SDLC is most commonly focused on in studies. This emphasis highlights the pivotal role of optimization and mathematical modeling in enhancing software development efficiency.

Empirical research is playing a significant role in software engineering (SE), and it has been applied to evaluate software artifacts and technologies. There have been a great number of empirical research articles published recently. There is also a large research community in empirical software engineering (ESE). In this paper, we identify both the overall landscape and detailed implementations of ESE, and investigate frequently applied empirical methods, targeted research purposes, used data sources, and applied data processing approaches and tools in ESE. The aim is to identify new trends and obtain interesting observations of empirical software engineering across different sub-fields of software engineering. We conduct a mapping study on 538 selected articles from January 2013 to November 2017, with four research questions. We observe that the trend of applying empirical methods in software engineering is continuously increasing and the most commonly applied methods are experiment, case study and survey. Moreover, open source projects are the most frequently used data sources. We also observe that most of researchers have paid attention to the validity and the possibility to replicate their studies. These observations are carefully analyzed and presented as carefully designed diagrams. We also reveal shortcomings and demanded knowledge/strategies in ESE and propose recommendations for researchers.